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A month and a half after Fei Dawei’s massive exhibition opened in Lyon, I found myself looking at Roman busts without noses on the ground floor of the Shanghai Art Museum. Shanghainese were crowding the temporary exhibition hall, reading simplified wall texts in simplified characters. A brutal period of civil war separated the Republic and the Empire, the texts said. Agriculture continued to develop. People worshipped household gods.
Was there any connection between the basement holdings of various Tuscan museums, dug up and sent to Shanghai for Men and Gods in the Rome of the Caesars, and Le Moine et le Demon, the largest exhibition of Chinese contemporary art—if one’s metrics are budget and floor size—yet mounted in Europe?
Le Moine et le Demon,which occupied the entire exhibition space of the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon between June 8 and August 15 of this year, meant different things to different participants. For curator Fei Dawei, it was a comeback, the first major exhibition he would curate since 1997. For the Guangdong Museum of Art, which lent its imprimatur and its budget, it was a chance to be the first Chinese museum to sponsor an exhibition abroad, cementing its authority as the most forward-looking of state museums. For collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens, who underwrote the show to the tune of €750,000, it was a way to move beyond their 2002 collection show Paris-Peking, and, through the vehicle of their smart foundation, into the headier realm of a museum show. For the Lyon museum, it was a way to end the French “Year of China” with an exhibition it considered more intelligent than the several dozen that had preceded it. “Other museums have done China; we’re doing artists,”said museum director Thierry Raspail to a room of reporters.
But for the artists, it was to be pure liberation. As Fei Dawei wrote in his preface:
This exhibition is unlike other exhibitions held in the West, because in it, Chinese contemporary art is not posited yet again as a collective entity, or a manifestation of social phenomena, but as an individual undertaking. The participants have been selected not because of their identity as Chinese artists, but because of the quality of their work. The entire structure of the exhibition is based on displaying individual artists and works. The works exhibited here are not illustrations of the changes in Chinese society, nor are they reports on the latest trends. They are simply juxtapositions of different works by different artists.
The title comes to us from a Chinese Buddhist proverb: “If the way (dao) grows an inch, the demon (mo) gains a foot.”Nomenclature was not an easy task: at last check, the English title was “The Way and the Demon.”The Chinese title, originally “Mo Yu Dao,”or “Demon and Dao,” ended up as “Li Li Wai Wai,”roughly translated—and the slippage here is ironic—“Inside Out.” The titular proverb was intended to suggest that for all Chinese art’s recent popularity abroad, and for all its increasing “legitimization” in the homeland, we must remain constantly vigilant.
Explaining this in his catalogue preface, Fei Dawei invoked a less highbrow American proverb: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”Beware artists, the warning goes: for every new gallery in Factory 798, for every Ullens wannabe with a $10,000 cheque, there is an imperialist Western curator looking to turn your work into “an illustration of social change in contemporary China.”
Figure 1. Sui Jianguo, Clothes Wrinkle Study: Right Arm, 2003, sculpture. Photo credit: Bruno Amsellem. Courtesy of Guy and Myriam Ullens Foundation
This show was to be both a new beginning and a final solution: a presentation of artists as artists and works as works. And how better to end the “Année de la Chine en France” that began with a “flea market” exhibition at the Pompidou and climaxed at Chinese Spring Festival with the Eiffel Tower bathed in red and a dragon-dance goose-step down the Champs Elysée? Looking back on a year of Airbus orders, Carrefour openings, and joint naval war games, the Chinese and the French would make another pact: Chinese artists would “say farewell to their collective image,”as the headline of the Southern Weekend review went on to put it. The subaltern would speak, and then eat andouillette.
Thus, without irony, an exhibition looking to overturn the twin orthodoxies of political pandering and misunderstanding abroad, and self-censorship at home was mounted at the end of a blatantly Orientalist celebration, financed by a pre-eminent Western collector, and orchestrated by a Chinese museum that in the spirit of retired Chairman Jiang’s Three Represents (The Party represents: the most advanced culture) was stretching its limbs abroad. And all within days of the opening of the Wu Hung/Christopher Phillips photo carnival in New York.
And what better work to install in the first hall of an exhibition aimed at challenging our deepest held perceptions of Chinese art and politics than ...the giant hand of Mao Zedong (fig. 1)? A massive outstretched right arm from Sui Jianguo’s “folds” series gobbled up its white room and invited viewers in, coated in a gloriously thin patina of Dashanzi mud.
A tiny video screen hung from the hallway into the next room, looping Yang Zhenzhong’s video Shower,set up the real tension that ran through the exhibition. In this brilliant little video, a mentally handicapped man clothed in Red Army gear frantically soaps and soaks as uptempo military marches play in the background. Contrary to the exhibition’s theoretical premises, Sui’s hand and Yang’s screen appeared as Beijing and Shanghai versions of the politically illustrative work the exhibition claimed to despise. Consistent with its achievement, they were also some of the best-installed versions of that genre yet to emerge.
The Shanghai irony-mongers and videographers who have become darlings of European exhibitions were well represented: Yang Fudong, Liang Yue, and Lu Chunsheng. Yang Fudong
Figure 2. Xu Zhen, Comfort, 2004, installation. Photo credit: Bruno Amsellem. Courtesy of the artist showed another edition of Unknown Paradise, and Liang Yue a self-absorbed video with as many minutes as she has years: twenty-three. Lu Chunsheng showed The Curved Line that Coughs,a sweet video on a tiny screen that looks down at a line of people from an apartment window.
Two Shanghai artists got big play: Yang Zhenzhong, who also showed an eight screen circular projection, and Xu Zhen, who transformed a Third World bus into a washing machine. Yang’s work, Encircled, was realized in Shanghai with sixty actors. Concerned with how to truthfully record movement, Yang settled on using a shaky camera hand. The result, in which vaguely familiar Shanghai art scenesters undulate toward the viewer, is claustrophobic, even though the installation was one of the exhibition’s largest. (In defiance of catalogue essay militancy, the materials released by the Lyon museum tell us that “This work is representative of the vision of the young generation living in a Chinese context of extreme change.”)
Xu Zhen’s work, entitled Comfort (fig. 2), involved shipping a shoddy fifteen-passenger bus from China, sealing it, filling it with water and soap, and wiring it into a washing machine. Through the windows, viewers could watch clothes wash. As with most of Xu’s works, this one defies exegesis. He thought it might be funny, and it kind of was.
As in Xu Zhen’s now-famous Tw ins exhibition in a Jinshajiang warehouse during the 2002 Shanghai Biennale, each of these Shanghai works had their Beijing doppelgangers. Yang Zhenzhong’s was by Wang Gongxin, whose four-screen video Courtyard was mounted in the same room that once held Kim Soo-ja’s Needlewoman. One stood among the quadruple projections, waiting for the Capital-style doors to open and close, revealing scenes of construction and folk dancing. Xu Zhen’s was by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, who shipped over a construction site cement mixer and a healthy supply of human ash to mix into bricks. If Xu’s work was silly and light, Sun and Peng’s was needlessly heavy-handed and self-consciously edgy.Yes, the vestiges of shock still litter the Beijing scene, but this effort to inject a bourgeois museum with a little piece of Beijing basement at the turn of the millennium seemed poorly rationalized, if chillingly executed.
The other Beijing videographers—Li Yongbin and Song Dong—made a strong showing. Li Yongbin, that unfailing minimalist, recorded a sunset the length of a VHS cassette. It was projected
Figure 3. Gu Dexin 06.08.2004, 2004, installation. Photo credit: Bruno Amsellem. Courtesy of Guy and Myriam Ullens Foundation in a tiny room set off from the crowd. Guy Ullens called it his favorite work. Song Dong showed a giant hand slapping the floor, projected from above in a semi-dark room.
But two walk away Beijingers had no Shanghai counterparts: Zhuang Hui and Gu Dexin. Zhuang re-installed his Beijing Biennale darling, a giant steel press made of styrofoam. The narrative behind the work is that Zhuang once worked in such a factory in his native Henan, where he witnessed a foreman’s legs crushed the night before Spring Festival. How much better things would have been had those machines been as light as foam! The installation in Lyon was meant to protect the work—viewers could not touch the machines, as they could in Beijing, where their fingernails left damaging traces. The room was so dim that this reviewer actually believed the artist had shipped over real machines—which seemed not at all ridiculous in keeping with the exhibition’s shipping budget largesse. So Zhuang Hui succeeded at industrial mimesis, creating a convincing factory room that from a distance did not reveal its satire.
Gu Dexin launched the closest thing he has ever had to a retrospective (fig. 3). In a room with blood-red walls, he arranged dozens of works held together by a shared formal conceit: squiggly lines. One wall was inset with glass cases full of little clay aliens procreating. Another was hung with industrial plastics resembling seaweed that Gu had collected over the years. Another was hung with his drawings of the same clay figures, variously engaged. As usual, the floor was covered with green apples, tempting viewers into original sin. Rising from the apple-floor came a set of supermarket freezers, filled with squiggly pig brains, and a table bearing the boxes of dried meat that were the basis for some of his earlier works.
The exhibition’s two painters were well chosen: Beijing-based Xie Nanxing, whose wistful triptych sought to capture the feel of a rainy windshield, and Shanghai’s Wang Xingwei, who served up his typical smattering of hastily painted scenes on strange materials. One painting of a football pitch, tempera on cardboard, was particularly memorable.
Rong Rong and inri transplanted part of last autumn’s Beijing solo show, a set of romantic distant nude self-portraits taken in and around Mount Fuji. Rong Rong also showed the standard East
Village prints. But every exhibition needs its new discovery, and this one had Wang Ningde. The thirty-two- year-old Guangzhou photographer made his Beijing debut last fall at the same Gu Zhenqing-curated satellite show that supplied so many other works in this exhibition. His diligently composed and haunting pictures show soldiers, teachers, families, little kids—all with their heads slanting downwards and their eyes closed.
If Beijing-Shanghai tension was at the heart of the show, another dialectic, between the diasporic Chinese artists Figure 4. Huang Yongping, Tête d’Or, 2004, installation, 5 x 4 x 4 m. Photo credit: Blaise Adilon. Courtesy of the artist and a diasporic Chinese curator, framed it nicely. Huang Yongping, Yang Jiechang, Shen Yuan, and Lin Yilin provided emblematic works outside the museum; Lu Jie’s recapitulation of The Long March: A Walking Visual Display occupied the museum’s entire top floor.
Huang’s work was typically brilliant: a tête d’or for the museum, situated across the street from the Parc de la tête d’Or (fig. 4). The park’s name refers to a Christ-head buried there by a Jew in 1853. In Huang’s piece, cultural exchange takes the opposite turn, as a gold-plated pavilion in the Song dynasty style is mounted squarely above the columns of the museum’s façade. There was an urban myth that Beijing’s mid-1990s mayor would approve any construction project with the hint of a Chinese roof. Huang artfully rendered this same urge for slap-it-on culturalism: as it opened itself to China, the Lyon museum wore a funny little Chinese hat.
Shen Yuan’s was less brilliant. In mock honour of a 1914 exhibition of Chinese three-wheeled cycles held in Lyon, she simply imported several dozen of the vehicles from Fujian, and had them set out in the Place Bellecour in the city centre.
Yang Jiechang hung a fine curtain over the museum’s main staircase, embroidered in gold with human bones. Entitled Scroll of Secret Merits (fig. 5), it invoked divination practices. He then hired a troupe of Guangdong folk singers to mount a tiny stage by the door during the opening, singing political tunes in provincial dialect incomprehensible to all but a few. (The singers—who had never left Guangdong—proved an even greater asset at the banquet which followed the opening, angering the several diners who were not part of the museum group.)
Lin Yilin’s kylin bursting through a cinderblock wall allows us to have the whole China fantasy in one work: the land of mythical eastern animals and speedy construction. Though the work was installed inside the museum, it was chosen for the exhibition posters that were hung around town.
On the third floor, The Long March finally accomplished its dream of exhibiting beyond China (fig. 6). Curator Lu Jie plastered a giant room with photographs, and filled it with artifacts ranging from tiny Mao sculptures to the Apple PowerBook he took with him on the road. Those familiar
Figure 5. Yang Jiechang, Scroll of Secret Merits (Parchemin Divinatoire), 2004, installation. Photo credit Bruno Amsellem. Courtesy Guy and Myriam Ullens Foundation with the Long March—including many of the artists exhibited in Lyon—felt a sense of completion; those unfamiliar—i.e. the French viewers for whom the display was intended—were given little to go on. A one sentence text on a large white wall gave only the most basic outline of the project; beyond that viewers were left to indulge their own Marxist utopian visions by looking through a room of what must have seemed images of nostalgic cultural tourism. (Full disclosure: this reviewer worked on the Long March between August 2002 and August 2003.)
One was hard pressed on opening night to say who had it better, or who was looking at whom. Was it the globe-trotting Chinese artists, or the artsy French provincials—all of whom managed to skip the tedious welcoming speeches in order to grab a cigarette on the terrasse. There was something so Chinese-urban about Renzo Piano’s Cité Internationale—which housed the museum—even beyond the name, which would work perfectly in Mandarin as Guojicheng.The glass and steel mid-rise apartment houses could as easily have graced the banks of Suzhou creek; the sole neoclassical façade, left to front the Musée d’Art Contemporain Lyon, could as easily have housed a restaurant in Xintiandi, the plot of gentrified, redeveloped colonial mansions surrounding the site of the Chinese Communist Party’s first meeting.
Even politically, one was unsure whose government was more deluded: was it the Chinese, whose embassy served up a red-dressed foreign ministry matron spewing the obligatory thanks in perfect French in the mayor’s brocaded office? Or was it the French, whose cultural bureaucrats constantly invoked the politics of friendship and the dubious logic of le jumelage? (Canton and Lyon, we were told repeatedly, are cities “full of sun.”) Only a sound work by Xu Zhen could provide an intelli- gent rebuke of all to this posturing, interrupting the officials’ opening-night declamations with a shrill, piercing scream played over speakers in the courtyard outside.
Equality is only ever equality of capital, and this exhibition, in its richness, provided Chinese artists with a chance to be made to look good. Artists got what they wanted, shipping cement mixers and minibuses down the Pearl River and across the continent, and not having to worry about how many LCD projectors they could secure. But there were no breakthroughs in Lyon, which despite its protests, was exactly what it claimed not to be: an exhibition of Chinese contemporary art.
Figure 6. The Long March: A Walking Visual Display, 2000-2004, installation. Photo credit: Bruno Amsellem. Courtesy of the Guy and Miriam Ullens Foundation
And what’s wrong with that? Exoticism persists (on both sides) not out of malice, but because our brains are small and our vision limited. China can only be displayed to Lyon as a far-off land of kylins and cinderblocks, just as Rome can only be displayed to Shanghai as a set of busts and coins framed by historical tidbit. Even if simple Orientalism is becoming geopolitically untenable, even if Chinese art, now semi-implicated in the Chinese state, is looking to speak for itself, and even if a millennial Medici in a finely tailored khaki suit with the very best of intentions enlists a Chinese Parisian to try and change all this, we’re going to be ogling each other’s broken noses and outstretched arms for some time after the “Year of China” ends.
Notes 1 Yang Ruichun, “Chinese Contemporary Artists Say Farewell to Collective Image,” Southern Weekend (June 24, 2004). 2 “In 1934, followed by thousands of supporters, Mao Zedong undertook the Long March, which, from 1934 to 1936 and over 9654 kilometers, led him to the head of the Chinese state. In 1999, Lu Jie, independent curator, decided to re-make the journey of the Long March with some artists. In 2002, in association with Qiu Zhijie, an artist himself, there were more than two-hundred and fifty artists, of all origins, who traveled together to thirteen of the original twenty-one sites. Each of these was an occasion for dialogue and exchange with the local population.”